The brutal but overdue exits of both Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi suggest that 2011 was a bad year for evil folks and a good one for the rest of us.

But 2011 also saw the deaths of many notables who spent their lives engaging in activities far more beneficial to their fellow human beings than those of al Qaida’s founder or Libya’s longtime dictator.

Former first lady Betty Ford personified both dignity and courage. A breast cancer survivor, she publicly confronted her alcoholism, ultimately becoming one of the most effective warriors in America’s fight against substance abuse. She was also an active feminist who vocally supported the equal rights amendment, and weighed in on the abortion issue as fervently pro-choice. Hers was truly a life worth celebrating, although it’s sobering that today no prominent elected official’s wife (or husband) could be as outspoken as Mrs. Ford was in the 1970s, or at least not do so without considerable risk to his/her spouse’s political viability.

Numerous public servants passed away this year, including a trio of prominent politicians. When New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro was selected as Democrat Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, she became not only the first female vice-presidential candidate of either major political party, but the first Italian-American national nominee as well. Former Illinois Senator Charles Percy was something almost as unusual these days as Italian-American female candidates for national office: The Republican, who for 18 years (1967-85) represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate, was a moderate who clashed with President Richard Nixon, a fellow member of the GOP, over the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.

Mark Hatfield represented a species even rarer than a moderate Republican; he was an unapologetically liberal one. The five-term (1967-97) senator from Oregon was his state’s governor when he became the only person to vote against a resolution by the National Governor’s Conference that expressed support for the Vietnam War. Not only that, he did so in 1966, an election year!

Other impact-makers who breathed their last this year included Sargent Shriver, the first head of the Peace Corps and founder of both the Jobs Corps and Head Start; Steve Jobs, one of the key architects of the personal computer revolution; The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a courageous fighter of segregation and other forms of bigotry during the early days of the civil rights movement; and exercise and fitness guru Jack LaLanne, who once swam the length of the Golden Gate Bridge underwater, shackled, handcuffed and towing a 1,000-pound boat. And that was at the tender age of 61, in 1975.

Professional curmudgeon Andy Rooney died just a month after his final commentary on 60 Minutes. Euthanasia activist Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s May death was seen by some to be paradoxical because it occurred due to natural causes. Former world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier was another whose passing was shrouded in irony; overshadowed in life by his loquacious adversary Muhammad Ali, Frazier’s death in November was shunted to the back of the sports pages about an hour after he died due to a headline-grabbing scandal involving alleged child molestation by a longtime member of iconic Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s staff.

The actors who portrayed Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk), Gunsmoke’s Marshal Dillon (James Arness), and M.A.S.H.’s Col. Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) all died this year. More disquieting: Finding out that the three actors, who to those of us of a certain vintage were seemingly on weekly TV only last week, were 83, 88, and 96 at the time of their respective deaths. The same sort of sobering observations could have been made at the departures of former Hollywood sex symbols Elizabeth Taylor (79) and Jane Russell (89) earlier in the year.

Another reminder of looming mortality to some males of my generation: The deaths of, among others, Matty Alou, Chuck Tanner, Steve Boros, Bob Forsch, Woodie Fryman, Roy Hartsfield, Ryne Duren, Jose Vidal, Ron Piche, Gino Cimoli, Greg Goossen, Duke Snider, Mitchell Page, Charlie Metro, Mel Queen, Harmon Killebrew, Paul Splittorff, Jose Pagan, Jim Northrup, Dick Williams, Don Buddin, Wes Covington, Mike Flanagan, Jesse Jefferson, Merritt Ranew, Mickey Scott, Charlie Lea, Cookie Gilchrist, Gale Gillingham, Ollie Matson, Bubba Smith, Drew Hill, Jim Seymour, Jim Mandich, Andy Robustelli, Tom Addison, John Mackey, Pete Duranko, Lee Roy Selmon, Sam DeLuca, Pete Gent, Tommy Watkins, and Forrest Blue during the past calendar year.

All may have gone to their reward, but to those of us who were weaned on Topps baseball and/or football cards, they remain frozen in time as 20 or 30-somethings, smiling, glaring or staring impassively at us from the front of those small cardboard rectangles for which we used to pay a nickel a pack.

— Andy Young teaches high school English in York County. During his free time he looks for opportunities to acquire 1960s era baseball cards for a nickel per pack.